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  Public, Proximity, Commons and Complex:
Some thoughts about Neighborhood-Labs 

The internet has long been perceived as a new and emerging public space. For many this digital realm offered an esc a pe from cities in which communication, transport, meeting places were rapidly privatised and commercialised. The internet was going to be that new “world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity” [1]. Also, it provided us with great tools and a source of inspiration for improving the way we could live together in the physical urban world of our cities.

Over time, t he net has fast become as divers and complex as the physical spaces we inhabit. I t fulfilled its potential for many mundane activities. At the same time, that initial freedom and independence seems to be under threat nowadays .

Which lessons can be learned from urban privatisation and the emergence of social counter movements? How can digital networks empower neighbourhood live? How can labs help "interrelate real and virtual spaces in order to form new living environments" ?  [2]

U rban contexts are defined by historian and architecture theorist Kazys Varnelis as " Networked ecologies: Hypercomplex systems produced by technology, laws, political pressures, disciplinary desires, environmental constraints and a myriad of other pressures, tied together with feedback mechanisms” [3]. 

It is questionable wether 'planning' developed by public policies is the most appropriate methodology for designing such hypercomplex systems as cities or the internet , where complexity arises from a continuous interaction between many dynamic elements . 

And here is where the idea of the "commons" can be very appropriate and useful.
Recent Nobel prize winner in Economic Sciences, Elinor Ostrom, notes that a great variety of natural resources, like pastures, lakes and forests, have been sustained by communities over long periods of time. Communities of inhabitants and users developed rules and protocoles that enabled them to manage and use these resources; building “local knowledge that is rich about those ecologies so that they create institutions that match the complexity of the systems that are involved, so those institutions have to be complex” [4].

The internet has brought back 'commons' based ways of organizing, managing and producing resources. In projects like GNU-Linux or Wikipedia users become a recursive public: “A public that is vitally concerned with the material and practical maintenance and modification of the technical, legal, practical, and conceptual means of its own existence as a public; it is a collective independent of other forms of constituted power and is capable of speaking to existing forms of power through the production of actually existing alternatives.” [5] 

Back to the physical space, and taking inspiration from the digital experience, the question is: How can city users hack into the kernel code of their urban platform? How can the notion of recursive publics be transferred to the physical space of the cities? 
David Harvey makes reference to Henry Lefebvre's concept of " the right to the city " , which emphasises the importance of a right to change : “The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization” [6] Neighborhood problems are specific , and m any cities have put in place participatory instruments that allow neighbours to engage in major urban processes in their area. But words such as 'participation' and 'publics' point to a non-equal authoritarian relationship. How to move beyond political hiërarchy?

It is obvious that this right to collectively change the environment we live in has to take into account proximity. Local knowledge is developed by being in touch with one's physical surroundings , but can also be extended and supported by the closeness of online communities. Digital networks provide access to resources and offer the possibility of taking an external perspective, they help develop reflection on the physical here and now in connection with elswhere localities .

The media-lab positions itself simultaneously in the margins and in the middle: it needs to escape fixed categories and cross boundaries in order to open up for experiment and unknown territoria. At the same time it is crucial for its activities to be a center for human interaction, to engage in a social political context.

Public spaces are an indispensible part of cities. They are spaces where citizens can express their differences and they stimulate processes of democratisation, emancipation and social change. By creating communality, media-labs are tools to extend and broaden public space, continu ing the tradition of hacklabs, squats, makers labs and social labs to actively engage with social environments. 
To use a tool that is meant to support production of media to rework public space is what Sara Ahmed calls 'creating a reorientation device'. [9] 
Media-labs can be devices that steer away from the governance of institutional politics, towards a praxis of urban tinkering, DIY and experimentation with the 'technical, legal, practical, and conceptual means' of the city.


NOTES:

[1] A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. John Perry Barlow https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html
[2] Urban Hacking as a Practical and Theoretical Citique of Public Spaces, Frank Apunkt Schneider / Guenther Friesinger .
http://www.paraflows.at/index.php?id=123&L=1
Quoted at Territorio = geología x infraestructuras x política, Nómada, by Juan Freire http://nomada.blogs.com/jfreire/
[3] The infrastructural city, networked ecologies in Los Angeles. ed Kazys Varnelis
[4] Beyond the tragedy of the commons. Elinor Ostrom at the Stockholm whiteboard seminars. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByXM47Ri1Kc
[5] Two Bits. The Cultural Significance of Free Software . Chris Kelty
http://twobits.net/
[6] The Right to the City, David Harvey http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2740
[7] Everything is miscelaneous, David Weinberger 
[8] The perception of the environment, Tim Ingold
[9] Queer phenomenology, Sara Ahmed